The Twisted Cross (17 page)

Everywhere there were lights flashing, buzzers buzzing, computer screens displaying row after row of numbers and letters, computer printers working non-stop, spitting out reams of data. Working feverishly over it all were three more beautiful women, attractively dressed in tight jeans and T-shirts, M-16s slung over their shoulders. /

"So this is the famous Hawk Hunter, you say?" a voice from the far end of the chamber asked.

Hunter and Fitz turned to see a middle aged man hunched over a work bench that was overflowing with electronic parts, wires and tools. He was wearing large tortoise shell glasses and a typically stained lab coat.

Hunter stepped forward. "I'm Hawk Hunter," he said matter-of-factly. "In the flesh . . ."

"I recognize you from the newspapers," the man replied. "Glad to see you're not dead."

"Me, too," Hunter said. "You're Dr. Sandlake?"

The man was in his late 40s, still somewhat handsome with a healthy shock of graying hair. It appeared as if he shared his female companion's penchant for fitness; Hunter thought the guy might have been a bodybuilder at some point.

"I'm Sandlake," he answered. "Sorry for the rather rude greeting before . . ."

he motioned to a intercom-type microphone near his work bench. "Got to be careful in this neighborhood these days."

"So we found out," Fitz said. "Did you realize there were more than a dozen men out there - heavily armed, too?"

"Of course, we did," Sandlake said. "They've been out there for a week now. Or maybe it's only been a couple days. I'm not too sure. But, in any case, did you chase them away?"

"You might say that," Hunter replied. "They were enemies of yours, right?"

Absolutely!" Sandlake said, thrusting a one finger in the air like a revved-up college professor. "They were trying to starve us out of here, the bastards."

"Starve you out?" Fitz asked. "They had enough fire power to level this place

-or at least the top part of the house. Maybe even this bunker, too."

"Ah, yes," Sandlake said. "But you see, that would have meant killing us -or more specifically, killing me. And I'm afraid to say those chaps wanted me quite alive."

The man stopped for a quick breath of air, then went on: "I think they were jealous," he said. "You may have noticed, my assistants are quite pulchritudinous." "If that means 'foxy,' you're right," Fitz said. Both Sandlake and Fitz laughed at the joke, but Hunter could feel the gratuitous conversation was heading out into the ozone somewhere. And the strangest thing was that while he was talking, Sandlake continued to tinker with some do-dad on his work bench. The man seemed to be working the absent-minded professor routine a little too much. It was as if the two pilots had just dropped in for nothing more than a friendly chat and now were no more than a distraction.

It was time to cut to the quick . . . "Like we said, we're here to talk to you about Project Chesapeake Bay," Hunter said firmly. "Specifically, underwater nuclear mines . . ."

Sandlake gave out a somewhat nutty laugh. "Well, that is funny," he said.

"Because that's exactly what those guys outside wanted to talk to me about also . . ."

"You can be sure we are here for a different motive," Hunter said. Then, for the next ten minutes, he patiently explained to the man the situation in Panama and what the United American Army Command Staff felt had to be done about it.

"We have to launch a massive attack on The Twisted Cross," Hunter told Sandlake. "But before we do that, we have to find some way to disarm those nuclear mines."

"We understand you're the expert behind their creation, is that right?" Fitz asked.

"Yes, quite right," Sandlake said, for the first time turning away from his tinkering. Suddenly he became very serious. "And I am quite aware of the nuclear mine system in the Canal. In fact, gentlemen, I not only created the monster-I'm the one who gave it all to the Twisted Cross."

Hunter almost asked the man to repeat himself.

"You did?" Fitz cried out. "In Heaven's name man, why?"

Sandlake took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. In the course of three seconds it appeared as if he was a completely different person. Gone was the jovial/bothersome professorial schtick. It was replaced with the worn-down look of a very troubled individual.

"Come with me, gentlemen" he said, rising from his seat at the end of the work bench. "It's a long, sad story . . ."

Two hours and one bottle of Scotch later, both Hunter and Fitz were shaking their heads in amazement.

Sandlake had led them into a smaller room off his fortified bunker. Mixing coffee with the bitter Scotch, the man talked and they listened.

After the Big War, Sandlake, who had been stranded in the Rockies on a Christmas ski weekend, tried to get transportation back to his office in Washington, thinking that would be the professional and patriotic thing to do.

But with the chaos and anarchy that ensued across the country following the Soviet's sneak attack on America's ICBM silos, he finally realized that there wasn't much for him to return to in the nation's former capital. He decided that getting here -his daughter's house near El Paso -was his next best bet.

Traveling by any means he could, including horseback, the doctor made the sometimes torturous 500-mile plus journey in two months. He arrived to find his daughter relatively safe, though grief-stricken that her oil executive husband of just three months had been killed in Saudi Arabia during the first day of the war.

Together, Sandlake, who was a widower, and his daughter struggled to eke out an existence in the isolated ranchhouse. El Paso was nearly deserted and tales of looters and drug-crazed bandits roaming the empty streets were enough to keep civilized people away from the city. Instead, the father and daughter grew their own food and raised some cattle for beef. A small but effective bartering agreement with some nearby survivors filled in the gaps, the Sandlakes usually trading either steaks or one of the doctor's many gadgets in return for clothing and firewood.

Sandlake said it was as close to a comfortable existence as one could expect in post-war, New Order America. Several years went by. News about the outside world was scarce. He and his daughter had heard rumors of great battles being fought up in the center of the continent, and on one occasion, they hid from a band of Circle Army deserters, who ransacked their storage bin. After that, Sandlake built the underground bunker and spent much of his free time manufacturing his electronic do-whats - security devices, mostly -for barter.

This relatively peaceful life came to a crashing halt very early one morning when his home was invaded by no less than one hundred armed men, brought in by a dozen Soviet-made assault helicopters. They were called The Party, and at first, claimed to be arms dealers. However, after a short talk with the leader of the group, a man named Frankel, Sandlake realized that the invaders knew many of the details about Project Chesapeake Bay and the underwater nuclear mines. What they wanted was the location of the actual hardware, which, they made quite clear to him, they wanted to use to solidify their takeover of the Panama Canal.

Sandlake refused to tell them. Two days of beatings and torture followed. It was during this time that the Party members learned that his daughter was actually a doctor too - she held a degree in a particularly strict discipline of archaeology.

Once the intruders learned this, they radioed their headquarters (which Sandlake believed was in Mexico City at the time) and soon some even higher officials of The Party

arrived at the ranch. They then turned their torture tactics on his daughter, demanding she tell them everything she knew about ancient Mayan sites in Central America as well as Inca sites in South America. She resisted at first

-so much so that a helicopter was dispatched to collect some sodium pentathol

- better known as truth serum.

After two days of constant injections, Sandlake's daughter finally broke. Her interrogators knew very well that her branch of archaeology - called "dark zone" archaeology - was the study of the deepest inner areas of ancient sites.

Two years before the war broke out, startling discoveries had been made at certain Mayan and Inca sites previously thought to have been researched to the full. "Dark Zone" archaeologists had found a number of manmade caves, walkways and tunnels underneath several Central and South American sites, often accessible only through narrow wet clay passages. These secret chambers had laid undiscovered for years by general school archaeologists as well as looters. The researchers theorized the Mayans and the Incas had used these Dark Zones for religious rituals or as hiding places.

But for what ever reason, in every case, the Dark Zoners found these strange places filled with gold . . .

The Party members were quick to realize they had come upon an incredible coincidence: Not only did they have the man who invented the small, nuclear-tipped underwater mines they sought for the Panama Canal, they also had someone who was an expert in locating long lost treasures of Mayan and Inca gold.

Once again the invaders started beating and torturing the doctor, demanding that he reveal the location of the nuclear mines. Finally, on the climactic 13th day of the nightmare, the Party members stripped his daughter naked in front of him and threatened to rape and then kill her if he didn't give them the information. Sandlake felt he had no choice but to tell, a decision aided by the fact that he too was injected several times with truth serum.

Two helicopters left the ranch and returned four days later to report that they had found the nuclear mines right

where Sandlake said they'd be -in the lead-lined underground storage center at the Key West Naval Air Station. Once they had what they wanted, the Party members bundled up his daughter and took her away. Then they took him out to the back of his house, shot him twice in the head and left him for dead.

Now it was Sandlake's time to get lucky. Shortly after the Party members departed, a bartering group happened by the ranch. They found Sandlake barely alive but still breathing and they took him with them. By some kind of miracle, he survived his severe head wounds, though he admitted that his mental capacities were only about 70 to 80-percent of what they once were.

"I was never absent-minded before all this," he told the pilots sadly. "But I came back from the dead. Saw my own body, lying there on the ground, blood everywhere. My blood! Believe me, that can't help but affect you. Now, sometimes I lose track of time, dates, my own past . . ." Once he recovered, Sandlake returned to the ranch and the underground bunker and immediately began work on a disarming device for the nukes. The "Deactivator" he called it. His short-circuited reasoning had him figuring he could hire some mercenaries to travel to the Canal and put the mines out of action. But his diminished capacity, along with a general lack of equipment, made the project slow going. Even when he recruited the four young women -no dummies, they were all graduate students in engineering from Texas A&M before the war -the work on the deactivator device dragged on. He made a mistake of trying to barter for some much needed equipment via an arms dealer working on the outskirts of El Paso. He thought that through this individual, word got back to The Twisted Cross that he was still alive.

The smaller group of Canal Nazis had landed just two days before. Surprised at the defensive firepower mounted by the doctor and his lovely assistants, they decided to play it safe and lay siege to the ranch, hoping to starve them out and retrieve whatever parts of the deactivator they had completed. Sandlake spent those past 48 hours intentionally entering misleading data into computers, so as to confuse the Nazis should they succeed in getting into his bunker.

"An incredible story," Hunter told the man.

"You should get all this down in writing," Fitz told him. "Should they ever start printing books again, this one will be a bestseller . . ."

"But the final chapters aren't written as yet," Sandlake said glumly. "At least I hope they haven't . . ."

"They haven't," Hunter told him. "First of all, we'll have a chopper here in the morning. You and your assistants are coming back to DC with us. You can work on the deactivator there. You'll have a lot more resources and more people to help."

"But what about my daughter?" the man asked, close to tears. "She's been missing for so long . ._."

"Don't worry about it," Hunter said decisively. "I'll get your daughter back for you . . ."

More than 1200 miles to the south as the crow flies, Colonel Krupp was sitting in the back of his command truck, drinking heavily.

His convoy was now halfway to the Uxmaluna site, the bombed-out, burned-away road provided for them proving to be very slow going. Two hours before, he had called a halt to work for the day, his troops mistakenly praising him for stopping a full four hours early. But he hadn't done it for their sakes. He would have worked them 24 hours straight if he thought he could get away with it.

His reasons for knocking off early were totally selfish and devious. That was why he had spent the last hour fortifying himself with a jug of bad banana brandy. He was an awful drinker. Having no experience with it, he tended to overindulge at all the wrong times. This occasion would be no exception.

Before him, tied to his fold-down bed, was the woman. She was stripped naked, bound hand and (foot to the bed-frame with leather straps and gagged with a cloth. It was the way he had dreamed of seeing her ever since the beginning.

Now was the opportunity . . .

He took another long gulp of the scorchingly bad brandy, and reached for a small leather whip. Her eyes went wide with alarm as she watched him play with the tassels. She tried to scream something, but the cloth in her mouth prevented that. However her aggressive action surprised him.

"You are not supposed to resist . . ." he said, drunkenly slurring the words. "You are here to be taught a lesson . . ."

She started to thrash about, hurting her arms and wrists where they were so securely tied to the bed. For his part he felt a guilty pang of true pleasure shoot through him as he watched her breasts and hips move back and forth